I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
I have few illusions about privacy -- feel free to follow me on Twitter: kashhill, subscribe to me on Facebook, Circle me on Google+, or use Google Maps to figure out where the Forbes San Francisco bureau is, and come a-knockin'.

Here's The Best (And Prettiest) Way To See Exactly How You're Being Tracked Online

A visualization of how I've been tracked over the last 12 hours, from Mozilla's Collusion

Firefox-browser provider Mozilla has released an awesome new tool for seeing how you’re being tracked on the Web. If you install the add-on Collusion, you’ll be able to get an aesthetically-pleasing graph showing you how any site you visit is putting trackers on you like an endangered animal in the wild. After installing yesterday, this is what my graph looks like after 12 hours, at right. I’ve highlighted the sites that have marked me with the “Quantserve” cookie, from Quantcast, which measures audiences on any given site, breaking them down by age, gender, educational and income level, ethnicity, and when, on average, they lost their virginity. (Okay, maybe not that last one.)

“We are being watched. It’s now time for us to watch the watchers,” said Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs in introducing the tool at TED yesterday, reports Wired. You can get the tool here if you’re a Firefox user, or just see a demo of how it works to track the trackers on a few popular sites, such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), NYTimes.com and the Huffington Post.

Recently, some of my commenters here at the Not-So Private Parts have remarked upon the irony of reading a page about privacy that places quite a few trackers on them when they visit. Here’s the visualization of some of the trackers added when you visit Forbes and come to my page:

Unfortunately, Mozilla’s cool Collusion tool doesn’t spell out what each of these does. But I’ll break down some of the tracking darts shot into you here at Forbes:

Chartbeat — This is a tool we use to track what’s happening on Forbes. It tells us how many people are reading each article on the site, how far down the article people are reading, which Forbes links they click on, etc. As I write this, for example, 124 people are reading the article I wrote about Target’s pregnancy prediction powers, and 55% of them are reading to the end of the article. When done, the majority of them are checking out 10 Interview Questions Designed To Trick You. I get no more individualized or personalized information about you than that. Our CPO Lewis Dvorkin often cites Chartbeat statistics in his analyses of Forbes robust online health.

Sharethis — That’s the widget that allows you to push a button to share Forbes articles on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google Plus, Stumbleupon, and LinkedIn.

Gigya — We recently wrote about Gigya. This company helps websites like Forbes incorporate social media (so that you can log in with your Facebook or Twitter account to comment and navigate the site). Gigya, in the words of my colleague Tomio Geron, provides us with “analytics to analyze the social profiles of its users” (a.k.a. you). That helps us know the value of our audience better and personalize content to you.

VisualRevenue — Like Chartbeat, this is tracking activity on the site for our use. It makes suggestions to us about what should be featured on the home page and around the site to generate the most interest/clicks. Now for the cookies that benefit third parties…

Mathtag — This places cookies on your computer to customize the third party advertisements displayed on various sites. You can opt out on their site, but if you later clear your cookies, it clears your opt out.

Korrelate — This company tries to match up online behavior with offline purchases “in a privacy sensitive way.” This allows them to see for example that most people who visited Saab.com last summer wound up buying Volvos. The company’s CEO says Korrelate doesn’t match up particular individuals with particular purchases but instead takes a “census-based approach.”

Bizographics / Bizo / BlueKai — These are cookies from companies that build profiles of consumers (your age, your gender, your interests, etc.) by tracking the websites you visit. Then they’re able to better target you with ads and sell to or exchange the info with other advertisers and marketers.

Scorecardresearch — This guy is part of the Comscore family, which has a bird’s eye view of the Internet thanks to having trackers all over it. It produces reports on general Internet trends, and also about behavior on specific sites, such as the recent shocking revelation that Google+ users spend on average three minutes per month there. Thanks to ubiquity of its trackers, it’s also got great profiles of individual users’ activities.

Truste — This is a company that does privacy consulting with various websites to advise them on how not to make missteps that will anger users and garner headlines. I’m not sure why they’re tracking you here.

I think that’s a fair rundown of the tracking going on when you come to Forbes and come visit my page. Good luck in your travels ’round the rest of the Web….

Opposition to this ubiquitous information collection on Web surfers has given rise to “Do Not Track” — a signal you could turn on in your browser that would send out the message that you don’t want to be shot with these darts. But “ Do Not Track” is kind of a misnomer. It would more appropriately be called “Do Not Target” or “Track Me A Little Less.” Here at Forbes, we could still track what you were up to on our site, but your behavior would not be tracked for the purpose of targeting you with ads. So only about half of the cookies above would get the boot.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

One thing I’d like a little more info on is TrustE. You wrote a piece about a very useless and difficult-to-comrpehend privacy policy from a site that they consulted for. We did a little TrustE-bashing in the comments. I’d like to know more about what they do, how they actually provide value to companies, and their track record.

Frankly, my gut feel is that they are like the FDIC of Internet privacy, only without the $200k guarantee. Sites pay them to put their logo on the site and give a feeling to individuals “don’t worry, this site is safe, TrustE has verified it”. This makes the site-owner happy because I feel safe browsing, and TrustE makes a cosy little penny off of it. My question is do they really do much to help ensure privacy? And what is the track record of TrustE verified sites having privacy issues?

Awesome post!!! I see a homework assignment here for my University students. Maybe an alternative to “Do Not Track” would be to make it mandatory to include a similar tracking visualization in every privacy policy, complete with a key explaining the function of each tracker. Better yet, give each tracker a cool avatar or image. Maybe then people would pay attention to those privacy policies that few ever read.